Lab Activities

Course Objectives

The objective of this course is to present the fundamental concepts to develop autonomous mobile robots. The course covers the basics of mobile robots control, kinematic theory, navigation, localization and perception. The course will consolidate the understanding of theoretical concepts through practical hands-on activities pertaining to robot programming and deployment. We use two types of robotics platforms: (1) the Arduino robot for quick and easy prototyping of control applications to illustrate theoretical concepts on navigation sensing and actuation. (2) Turtlebot robot with ROS Hydro for more advanced robotic application development using ROS with the objective to focus on application design and development.
The aim of this course is to give PSU students, in computer science and engineering colleges, an opportunity to discover the world of robotics, and design and develop real robotic applications.

Topics of Interest

Robotics is a wide discipline. In CS460, lectures and activities will focus the basic notion of an autonomous robot control loop. CS460 focuses mostly on computational issues for perception (estimation of the state of the world), decision making (deciding on actions to achieve objectives), and motion control (executing decided actions). CS460 does not cover in substance topics within robot mechanical engineering for building the body (actuators, sensors, physical parts) of a robot.